Fred Gibbons of Venture-Concept, an independent venture management company; Amidzad LLC, a seed and early-stage venture capital firm; and a number of Silicon Valley executives and investors participated in the Series A round.

"We are excited to close our first equity investment round, and we will use the funds to expand our development capabilities as well as our operations and customer support infrastructure.   Also, having highly-renowned investors validates our vision is on track, to be the industry leader in global intelligence solutions for optimizing product time-to-market, cost and quality processes for our customers," said Nader Fathi, president and CEO of SigmaQuest. "Mark Valentine's decision to join our board as chairman will greatly benefit SigmaQuest and our customer base as he has vast operations experience particularly in the manufacturing and supplier management arenas and can thus provide insight and direction toward the continued growth of the company."  

Valentine, who brings to SigmaQuest many years of experience from the manufacturing industries, will be actively involved in operations of the company and will work closely with the executive team on driving the company toward its next stage of growth.   He noted, "I am enthusiastic about joining SigmaQuest's board as the company is comprised of high-caliber individuals that are committed to addressing a real problem facing today's global distributed product development organizations.   As more operations are outsourced, it is increasingly difficult for product teams and management to access data they need for rapid decision making.   SigmaQuest customers and their partners are achieving real results - optimizing product time-to-market, reducing costs, and ensuring quality with complete traceability."  

SigmaQuest is in a unique position as its innovative SigmaSure product offering is designed for collecting, aggregating and analyzing test and quality data throughout the product lifecycle, regardless of the hardware and software that may be deployed at each location in a global operation.   The ability to review and perform detailed analytics on a real-time basis across multiple locations gives customers the means to continuously monitor in-circuit, functional, and burn-in test data including low-level test parameters and make rapid decisions to improve or correct product designs and manufacturing processes. The cost-effective solution can be quickly implemented by prospective customers that value timely, high-accuracy data and want the ability to drill down to find the real source of a test failure.   SigmaSure interfaces directly with industry testers and is designed to work along side in-house or outsourced MES and ERP applications.The enterprise solution can be easily extended to include new suppliers and partners as global operations evolve.

About Mark C. Valentine

Prior to joining SigmaQuest, Valentine was president of OPS Central, an operations outsourcing firm.   He was previously vice president of operations at Geyser Networks, an optical networking startup, where he managed all manufacturing programs, the supply chain, manufacturing engineering, test engineering, quality engineering, IT, customer service, and facilities. Prior to Geyser Networks, Valentine served as the director of strategic accounts at Flextronics, where he managed major global accounts.   He also successfully developed supply chain solutions to provide efficient and cost-effective manufacturing and distribution of global products.   Valentine also held a number of positions during his tenure at Tandem Computers. Valentine received his Bachelor of Science degree in industrial engineering from Stanford University in 1986 and a Masters of Science degree from Stanford in 1987.

About Fred Gibbons - Founder, Venture-Concept 

Gibbons is the founder of Venture-Concept, an independent producer of innovative start-up companies. Prior to Venture-Concept, Gibbons was the founding CEO of Software Publishing Company, maker of Harvard Graphics. He also served as marketing manager at Hewlett-Packard in minicomputers. Gibbons is a lecturer at the Stanford University Graduate School of Engineering. He holds a Masters in Business Administration from Harvard Business School and a Bachelor of Science and Master of Science in computer science from the University of Michigan.   www.venture-concept.com

About Amidzad 

Amidzad is a seed and early-stage venture capital firm focused on investing in emerging growth companies on the West Coast. It has over 50 years of combined entrepreneurial experience in building profitable, global enterprises from the ground up and over 25 years of combined investing experience in successful information technology and life science companies, including PayPal and Danger, Inc. Amidzad partners with entrepreneurs and leverages the resources of a strong network to build successful companies. www.amidzad.com

About SigmaQuest

SigmaQuest Inc. is an enterprise software company whose solutions provide unprecedented insight and actionable information to ensure product and process integrity, by collecting, aggregating and analyzing test and quality data. Its solutions enable global enterprises and their partners to optimize product time-to-market, cost and quality.   This is accomplished through personalized views of product quality information, pro-active alerts and comprehensive traceability - all in real-time.

The company is headquartered at 2901 Tasman Drive, Suite 109, Santa Clara, CA 95054.   It can also be reached at 408-654-9401, www.sigmaquest.com .

SigmaQuest is trademark of SigmaQuest, Inc.   All other trademarks and registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners.